Almost a Life

For Gabriel

Steph was Victor’s first love, and because of that, she was not merely a person — she was a before and an after. She split his life cleanly down the middle without ever meaning to.

He met her in his second year at uni, in London, when he still believed the city was generous. When he still thought it opened itself to you if you walked its streets long enough. It was autumn then — that slow London autumn that smells like damp leaves and impatience. The kind of weather that seeps into your bones and makes you crave warmth without knowing where to find it.

She was sitting two rows ahead of him in a lecture hall that always felt too cold, legs crossed, hair falling down her back in soft, careless waves. Victor noticed her the way you notice something beautiful before you admit to yourself that you’re staring. Not hunger. Not desire. Just recognition — as though some part of him had been waiting quietly for her arrival.

She turned around at some point — he never remembered why — and their eyes met. She smiled. Not a flirtatious smile. Not a promise. Just a simple, human acknowledgment.

And that was it.

Later, he would try to pinpoint the exact moment he fell in love with her, the way people do when they are looking for answers, but love doesn’t arrive like a headline. It seeps. It gathers. It becomes undeniable only after it has already claimed you.

Steph was beautiful in a way that felt unfair to everyone else. Five foot seven, legs long enough to make strangers stare, a face that looked like it had been assembled with intention — cheekbones sharp but kind, lips always slightly parted as if she were on the verge of saying something important. Her body curved like a promise Victor had not yet learned he was allowed to keep. She could have been a model, easily, but she carried her beauty lightly, as though it were incidental, as though it didn’t rearrange rooms when she entered them.

And God — the way she smelled.

Not overpowering. Not loud. Just there. Warm. Soft. Like comfort. Like belonging. Victor would later learn that scent can be a weapon — that it can reach parts of you memory cannot. But then, he only knew that when she leaned close, something inside him loosened, like a knot finally undone.

They started slowly. Almost politely.

Coffee after lectures. Long walks because neither of them wanted to go home yet. Conversations that stretched, unrushed, folding into themselves. Steph listened to him — really listened — and Victor had never known how rare that was. She asked questions that made him feel seen rather than examined. She remembered things. The small, unimportant details that somehow mattered the most.

And she was there.

She was there when he doubted himself, when imposter syndrome crawled up his spine and whispered that he didn’t belong in rooms full of ambition. She was there when he got his first tattoo — a stupid, impulsive decision that he pretended he’d thought through. She held his hand while the needle pressed into his skin, laughed when he clenched his jaw too hard, kissed him afterward like bravery deserved reward.

She was there for his highs — the good grades, the small victories, the moments when the future felt reachable. And she was there for his lows — the nights he went quiet, the days he felt too heavy for himself.

Love grew in the ordinary.

In Tesco aisles where they debated between cheap wine and slightly better cheap wine.

In borrowed hoodies and half-finished meals.

In nights where they lay on the floor because the bed felt too small for their dreams.

Victor did not know then that the most dangerous thing about love is not its intensity, but its certainty.

He believed her presence was permanent.

He believed love, once built carefully enough, could not simply vanish.

He believed that because he had never been taught otherwise.

And Steph — unknowingly, unintentionally — let him believe it.

Love did not arrive loudly for Victor and Steph. It did not announce itself with fireworks or reckless declarations. Instead, it moved in quietly, rearranged the furniture of Victor’s life, learned where everything belonged, and stayed.

By the time Victor realized he loved her, it was already too late to turn back.

She became routine. Not boring — essential. The way you only notice air when it’s gone. Steph was the first person he texted in the morning and the last person he thought about before sleep. He learned the rhythms of her moods, the subtle shifts in her voice that told him when she was tired, when she was overwhelmed, when she was pretending she was fine.

London became theirs.

They had places — not landmarks, but moments anchored to geography. A bench near campus where they first talked for hours without checking the time. A small café that remembered Steph’s order and pretended not to notice when they stayed too long. Streets Victor could no longer walk without instinctively reaching for her hand, even when she wasn’t there.

They grew into each other without ceremony.

Steph started leaving things in his room — hair ties, lip balm, a notebook she forgot but never really forgot. Victor started keeping spare change for her bus rides, learned which songs made her quiet, which films she rewatched when she needed comfort. He learned how she took her tea, how she folded her clothes, how she got distant when she was thinking too hard about the future.

And the future — God — they spoke about it constantly.

Not as a dream. As a plan.

They lay on the floor of his room one night, backs pressed against the carpet, rain tapping against the window like a question, and Steph turned her head toward him and said, almost casually, “I think I want three kids.”

Victor didn’t laugh. Didn’t hesitate. Just nodded, heart pounding, because something about the way she said it made it feel less like imagination and more like intention.

They argued playfully about names. About who would be stricter. About whether they’d live near family or carve out something new entirely. Marriage was discussed with the calm certainty of people who had already decided, even if they hadn’t said the words out loud yet.

“After graduation,” Steph would say.

“Yes,” Victor would reply.

Always after. Never if.

They talked about their first house with alarming seriousness for two students who still lived off instant noodles and hope. Steph wanted light — big windows, open space. Victor wanted quiet. They compromised on something modest, somewhere they could grow into rather than out of without feeling trapped by it. Somewhere that would hold their arguments and their laughter and the weight of becoming adults together.

Twenty-four.

They said it like a deadline and a promise wrapped into one.

Victor started planning his life around her without realizing it. His ambitions bent in her direction. His choices softened, sharpened, aligned. When he imagined success, she was there. When he imagined failure, she was still there — disappointed maybe, worried perhaps, but present.

That was the thing about Steph.

She was always there.

When Victor doubted himself — and he did, often — she anchored him. When his grades slipped, she sat beside him, reading silently, existing loudly enough to remind him he wasn’t alone. When his confidence cracked, she spoke of him as though his greatness were obvious, inevitable.

And Victor believed her.

He began to believe that love was not something that ended. That it was not fragile. That it did not leave without warning.

The city watched them grow — watched them merge.

Friends began to refer to them as a unit. Steph-and-Victor. Victor-and-Steph. Invitations came addressed to both. Assumptions followed naturally. Of course they’d last. Of course they’d marry. Of course this was it.

Victor wore that certainty like armour.

He did not know he was building his entire sense of safety on something he could not control.

Steph began to change subtly — so subtly Victor would later blame himself for not noticing. She became quieter sometimes, more inward. She stared out of windows longer than necessary. She asked questions that sounded hypothetical but weren’t.

“Do you ever think about who you’d be if we hadn’t met?”

“Do you think people outgrow each other?”

“Do you think love is enough?”

Victor answered honestly. Optimistically. He did not know these were not questions — they were warnings.

He assumed love, once built carefully, did not crumble. He assumed the years they had invested acted as a kind of insurance. He assumed the future they had spoken into existence was already binding.

Steph still smiled. Still kissed him. Still held his hand. And so Victor ignored the quiet dread curling at the edges of her presence.

Because how do you fear losing someone who has never left?

He did not know that love can be sincere and still temporary.

That devotion does not guarantee permanence.

That some people are meant to be formative, not final.

And so Victor loved her fully. Recklessly. With his entire becoming.

He did not ration himself.

He did not hold back.

He did not prepare for survival.

He believed — truly believed — that this was his life now.

And because of that belief, because of that faith, the fall would not simply hurt.

It would shatter.

There was no single moment Victor could point to and say, this is when it began to end. That was the cruelty of it. Love did not fracture loudly. It thinned. It stretched itself too far and began to lose its shape.

Steph didn’t leave him all at once.

She drifted.

At first, it was small things Victor convinced himself were nothing. She took longer to reply to messages. Not hours — just enough to make him notice. She cancelled plans with apologies that sounded sincere but tired. When she laughed, it didn’t always reach her eyes. When she kissed him, it felt gentler somehow, like she was holding back without knowing why.

Victor blamed stress. Deadlines. Life. Growing pains. He told himself love had seasons, and this was just one of them.

London had begun to feel heavier for her.

She spoke about feeling trapped sometimes, though she never used that word. She talked about needing space — not from him, she insisted, but from everything. From expectations. From plans that had started to feel too solid, too decided.

Victor listened, nodded, tried to understand. He did not hear the quiet panic beneath her words. He did not know that the future they had planned so carefully had begun to feel like a room Steph could not breathe in.

He loved her harder instead.

He showed up more. Texted more. Tried to be lighter, funnier, easier to love. He became gentler with her moods, more accommodating of her silences. He thought love meant adjusting yourself until the other person felt comfortable again.

He didn’t know that sometimes love asks you to let go — and he was incapable of that.

They still lay together at night, bodies familiar, limbs fitting as they always had. But sometimes Steph stared at the ceiling long after Victor had fallen asleep, thoughts buzzing like insects he could not see. Sometimes Victor woke up to the feeling that something important was slipping through his fingers, even though nothing tangible had changed.

He started to feel it in his chest — a low, persistent unease. Like waiting for bad news that hadn’t arrived yet.

“Are you happy?” he asked her one night, trying to sound casual.

Steph hesitated.

Just for a second. But Victor felt it like a bruise being pressed.

“I think so,” she said.

Think so.

He did not push. He didn’t want to interrogate her feelings into disappearance. He believed love should not feel like an exam.

But that hesitation lodged itself inside him, heavy and unmovable.

She began spending more time alone. Going on walks without telling him. Sitting in cafés by herself. Writing in a notebook she didn’t show him. Victor watched her become distant in ways that were impossible to name without sounding paranoid.

And then one day — without ceremony — she asked if they could talk.

Those words.

They have ruined lives.

They sat across from each other in his room — the same room where they had planned children, marriage, houses. The same room that still smelled faintly of her perfume, that held the imprint of her body in its corners. The room that had believed in them.

Steph’s hands were folded in her lap. Her voice was steady. Too steady.

“I don’t know who I am anymore,” she said.

Victor felt his heart stutter.

“I feel like I’ve been becoming someone inside this relationship instead of alongside it,” she continued. “And I don’t think that’s fair to either of us.”

He listened, nodding, every word landing somewhere deep and breaking something vital.

“I love you,” she said. And Victor knew — instinctively — that love, when spoken like that, is already halfway gone.

“I just don’t think I can do this anymore.”

He waited for the explanation that would make it make sense. The betrayal. The argument. The reason he could fight.

None came.

She didn’t accuse him of anything. Didn’t blame him. Didn’t say he wasn’t enough. And somehow, that hurt more than any cruelty could have.

She was calm. Gentle. Kind.

And she was leaving.

Victor didn’t cry then. He couldn’t. His body refused to process the information. He asked practical questions instead. Stupid questions. Questions that pretended there was a solution hidden somewhere in logistics.

“How long have you felt like this?”

“Is there something I can do?”

“Do you need time?”

Steph shook her head slowly, sadness flickering across her face like guilt.

“I’ve already decided,” she said.

Already.

The word echoed inside him.

She stood up eventually. Picked up her jacket. Looked around the room one last time — not nostalgically, not longingly — just observantly. As though she were closing a chapter she had already finished reading.

At the door, she paused.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

And then she was gone.

The silence she left behind was violent.

Victor sat there long after the door closed, staring at nothing, chest tight, lungs struggling to remember how to work. He expected the pain to arrive immediately — sharp, devastating, cinematic.

Instead, there was numbness.

A terrifying, hollow numbness.

He didn’t sleep that night. Or the next. His phone felt heavier than it ever had. He kept checking it instinctively, expecting a message that would undo everything.

None came.

Days passed. Then weeks.

Victor stopped going to lectures. The campus became unbearable — every bench, every hallway carried her ghost. Friends asked questions he couldn’t answer. Concern wrapped around him like a suffocating blanket.

He replayed everything.

Every conversation. Every smile. Every moment he might have missed. He searched desperately for the exact point where he could have saved them, convinced that if he could find it, the pain would make sense.

But love does not always leave evidence.

It simply stops choosing you.

And Victor — who had built his entire understanding of the future around Steph’s presence — began to realize something terrifying.

He had no idea who he was without her.

Grief did not arrive dramatically for Victor. It did not knock. It let itself in, sat quietly in the corner of his life, and refused to leave.

At first, he told himself this was temporary. That heartbreak had a timeline. That people survived these things every day and still went on to live ordinary, intact lives. He told himself he just needed time.

But time did not heal him.

It hollowed him out.

His days lost their shape. Morning bled into afternoon, afternoon into night. He stopped noticing hunger until his body felt weak and resentful. He stopped noticing sleep until exhaustion dropped him without warning. The world continued — buses ran, lectures happened, London breathed — and Victor felt like a ghost haunting his own life.

He kept expecting Steph to return.

Not dramatically. Not with apologies or tears. Just casually. A text that said, I’ve been thinking. A knock on the door. A laugh that said, We were being stupid. He believed this with a desperation that embarrassed him, even in private.

Because how could something so real simply end?

Her absence was everywhere.

In his room, where her presence lingered like a scent that refused to fade. In his phone, where her name sat at the top of old conversations, a history he reread until the words began to blur. In the city, which now felt hostile, like it had taken her side.

He walked streets they used to walk together and felt physically ill. Sat on trains and remembered her head against his shoulder. Passed cafés where she had once smiled at him and wondered how a place could look the same after everything had changed.

Victor began to unravel quietly.

He missed lectures — not out of rebellion, but because he could not imagine sitting in a room pretending to care about anything that was not his loss. Assignments piled up. Emails went unanswered. A tutor eventually asked to see him, concern etched into her face, and Victor nodded through the conversation like a polite stranger inhabiting his body.

He almost dropped out.

The thought scared him — not because he loved uni, but because Steph had always believed in him. And even now, even broken, he could not bear the idea of failing the version of himself she once loved.

His friends tried.

They sat with him. Brought food he didn’t eat. Told him he deserved better. Told him she didn’t deserve him. Told him he would love again.

Victor smiled weakly and nodded.

But they didn’t understand.

They spoke as though Steph were replaceable. As though love were interchangeable. As though the future Victor had lost was just a person, not an entire life he had already lived in his head.

At night, the ache intensified.

Sleep brought no relief. Dreams betrayed him, resurrecting her with cruel accuracy. He would wake up reaching for her, heart racing, only to remember — again — that she was gone. Each realization felt fresh, like the wound refused to scar over.

He started talking to her in his head.

Telling her about his day. About the funny thing someone said. About how much it rained. About nothing at all. He imagined what she would have replied, heard her voice with painful clarity.

Sometimes he whispered her name out loud, just to prove she had existed.

He loved her still. That was the worst part.

Love does not disappear simply because it is no longer welcome. It lingers. It rots. It turns inward.

Weeks passed. Then months.

And then — as if the universe had not yet finished with him — Victor found out she was married.

Three months.

Three months after she had looked him in the eyes and said she needed to find herself.

He saw the photo on his phone, accidentally, cruelly. A mutual friend’s post. White dress. Flowers. Steph glowing in a way Victor had once believed was reserved for him alone.

A man stood beside her.

Not Victor.

The room tilted.

He sat down slowly, carefully, as though any sudden movement might cause him to shatter completely. His chest tightened so sharply he thought — for a brief, terrifying moment — that something inside him had physically broken.

Married.

The word felt obscene.

He stared at the photo until his eyes burned. Until the image stopped looking real and started looking like a lie his mind could not accept. He scrolled through more pictures — the smiles, the celebration, the ease with which she occupied a life Victor had been expelled from.

It felt like erasure.

Like their years together had been a rehearsal she no longer acknowledged. Like the love he had poured into her had been a temporary shelter she moved out of without a backward glance.

He didn’t cry then either.

He laughed.

A short, broken sound that startled him with its bitterness.

That night, something in Victor finally gave way.

Not loudly. Not publicly.

But completely.

He lay on his bed staring at the ceiling, breath shallow, heart pounding, convinced — irrationally, viscerally — that he might actually die from this. That the human body was not meant to contain this much loss and still function.

He thought of the children they had named.

The house they had planned.

The future that now belonged to someone else.

And for the first time since Steph left, Victor understood something with devastating clarity:

She had not just left him.

She had replaced him.

And there was nothing — absolutely nothing — he could do to stop it.

After Steph got married, the world did not pause out of respect for Victor’s grief. That was the most offensive part of it all.

London remained efficient. Trains arrived on time. People laughed loudly in cafés. Couples held hands without apology. Life moved forward with an indifference so complete it felt intentional, as though the city itself were conspiring to remind him how replaceable his suffering was.

Victor learned, slowly, how to exist again.

Not how to live — that felt like too generous a word — but how to perform the necessary motions of being alive. He woke up. He showered. He attended lectures sporadically, sitting in the back, eyes unfocused, writing notes he would never reread. He responded to messages with careful brevity. He smiled when required.

Grief became quieter, but heavier.

It lodged itself in his chest like an old injury that flared without warning. Some days were tolerable. Some days were unbearable for reasons he could not articulate. A smell. A song. A woman with Steph’s hair crossing the street. Each reminder hit him with the same blunt force: she existed, and she chose another life.

He stopped checking her social media.

Not because it stopped hurting, but because the pain had become too precise. Each photo felt like a deliberate act of cruelty, even though he knew it wasn’t meant for him at all. He wondered if she ever thought of him when she posted those pictures — if some part of her hesitated before sharing a happiness that had once been his imagined future.

He doubted it.

That realization did something to him.

Victor began to understand that closure is a myth people invent to survive endings. There would be no final conversation. No explanation that made everything align. No apology that could restore what had been taken.

Steph had moved on completely.

And Victor was left with the echo.

He tried to date once.

It was a mistake.

The girl was kind. Patient. Interested. She asked him questions. She laughed at his jokes. She leaned in when he spoke. And all Victor could think about was how wrong it felt. How every gesture was compared against a memory that refused to fade. He went home early and stared at the ceiling for hours afterward, ashamed of himself for expecting someone else to fill a space that had never been meant for them.

He realized then that love does not end cleanly. It leaves residue.

Steph lingered in him — not as longing anymore, but as a reference point. She had shaped him too thoroughly to be erased. His expectations of love, his understanding of intimacy, his sense of the future — all of it bore her fingerprint.

He carried that quietly.

Sometimes, late at night, he allowed himself to remember her without anger. The way she laughed when she was genuinely amused. The way she pronounced certain words. The way she used to trace absentminded patterns on his arm when she was thinking. He didn’t romanticize it anymore. He didn’t curse it either.

He just remembered.

And some nights, that was harder than pain.

He finished uni.

Barely. But he did.

On graduation day, surrounded by families and partners and futures that felt loudly celebratory, Victor stood alone. He thought of Steph then — of how they had once spoken about this day as though it belonged to both of them. He wondered where she was. If she was happy. If marriage had given her the clarity she had been searching for.

The question no longer destroyed him.

It simply existed.

That was the strangest part of healing — realizing that the thing you thought would kill you had instead become something you lived beside. Not comfortably. Not peacefully. But persistently.

Victor never stopped loving Steph.

Not in the way people mean when they say that — not with longing or hope or expectation. But in the quiet way you love something that shaped you irreversibly. The way you love a scar. The way you love a former version of yourself.

She had been his first love.

And first loves, he learned, do not fade. They do not loosen their grip. They do not ask permission before staying.

They simply change form.

Years later, Victor would still think of her sometimes — in moments of unexpected stillness, in flashes of memory that arrived uninvited. And each time, there would be a small, familiar ache.

Not sharp.

Not consuming.

Just enough to remind him that once, he had loved someone so completely that losing her nearly unmade him.

And somehow, impossibly, he had survived.

There are losses that announce themselves loudly, that demand to be mourned in public, that draw attention and ceremony. And then there are the other kinds — the ones that go unnoticed by everyone except the person carrying them.

Victor’s was the second kind.

Time passed. Not gently, not kindly, but insistently. He got older in the way people do when life keeps moving and you don’t want to be left behind. His face changed slightly. His voice deepened. His shoulders learned a new kind of stillness. He learned how to talk about Steph without his throat closing, how to say her name as though it belonged to the past and not to something still living inside him.

But something in him never fully returned.

It wasn’t sadness. He learned how to function without that swallowing him whole. It wasn’t longing either — he stopped wishing for her, stopped imagining alternate endings where she came back and chose him again. What remained was quieter and harder to explain.

It was the loss of innocence.

Before Steph, Victor had believed love was cumulative — that every year invested strengthened it, that shared history was a shield against endings. He believed that planning a future together somehow anchored you to it. He believed that if two people loved each other sincerely enough, the rest would arrange itself around them.

After her, he knew better.

He learned that love does not owe you permanence.

That sincerity does not guarantee longevity.

That someone can love you deeply and still decide to leave.

This knowledge settled into him like sediment.

Victor became careful.

Not cold — people often mistook him for that, but it wasn’t true. He still laughed easily. Still cared. Still showed up. But he no longer gave himself away without reservation. He kept parts of himself unclaimed, untouched, as though protecting them from a future loss he could already imagine.

He dated again, eventually. Slowly. Cautiously. He learned how to be present without being reckless. How to love without surrendering completely. How to keep one foot on solid ground even when his heart leaned forward.

Some people mistook this for maturity.

Victor knew it was grief, repurposed.

Sometimes, late at night, when the city softened and the noise receded, he thought about the version of himself that had loved Steph. The boy who had believed so fully in a shared future that he built his entire identity around it. The boy who had loved without calculation or contingency.

That boy never came back.

And Victor mourned him more than he mourned the relationship itself.

Because that version of himself had been brave in a way Victor no longer knew how to be. He had loved without armour. Trusted without evidence. Believed without needing guarantees.

Steph had not just been his first love.

She had been the last time he loved like that.

So in a very messed up way, she was his first and last.

Occasionally, he wondered if she understood the magnitude of what she had left behind. Not the relationship — relationships end every day — but the quiet devastation of being someone’s origin story. Of shaping the way another person would approach love for the rest of their life.

He never reached out to her.

Not because he didn’t want to, but because he finally understood something essential: some silences are acts of self-preservation. Some doors are better left unopened, even if you still remember what it felt like to live on the other side.

London no longer hurt the way it once had. The streets softened. The memories dulled. The city reclaimed itself as just a place, not a mausoleum.

But every so often — on a train ride, or in the middle of a quiet evening — Victor felt it again. That faint, familiar ache. Not grief. Not longing.

Recognition.

Of who he had been.

Of what he had lost.

Of what love had cost him.

And in those moments, he allowed himself to feel it — not as punishment, but as proof. Proof that once, he had loved with everything he had. Proof that his heart, though altered, had been capable of something immense.

That was the final truth of it:

Steph did not destroy Victor.

But she broke him open in a way that never fully healed.

And the man he became afterward carried that break inside him — quietly, carefully — for the rest of his life.

~Emma🦋